Rapscallion

“Punished how?” Hawkwood pressed.

“They get put in the hole,” Millet said, removing a fish bone from between his teeth and flicking it over his shoulder.

Hawkwood scraped his lump of cod to the side of his mess tin. “Hole?”

“The black hole.” Millet’s tone implied that he could only have meant the one hole and Hawkwood should have known that.

Fouchet laid down his spoon. “It’s a special punishment cell; makes the gun deck look like the gardens at Versailles.”

Across the table, Lasseur considered the description. He stared hard at Fouchet and said, “What about the ones who got away, how did they do it?”

Fouchet shrugged. “You’d have to find them and ask them.”

“You don’t know?” Lasseur said.

“Sometimes it pays not to ask too many questions.”

“You’ve never considered it?”

The teacher shook his head. “It’s a young man’s game. I don’t have the energy. Besides, the war won’t last for ever.”

“The Lord loves an optimist,” Charbonneau muttered, scratching the inside of his groin energetically.

Lasseur pushed his tin to one side. “I have to ask, Sébastien: how, in the name of the blessed Virgin, did someone like you end up in a place like this?”

Fouchet smiled, almost sadly. “Ah, if you only knew how many times I’ve asked myself that very same question.”

“You going to eat that?” Millet sniffed, indicating the remains of Lasseur’s fish.

Lasseur gave him a look as if to say, What do you think? He then watched, fascinated, as the seaman reached over and, with grubby fingers, helped himself from the tin.

“I committed an indiscretion,” Fouchet said. “I was a professor of mathematics at the university in Toulouse and I had a liaison with the wife of one of my colleagues. He did not take kindly to the title of cuckold and insisted on calling me out. Unfortunately for him, I proved the better shot. His friends took it rather personally. They had influence, I did not. I lost my position, along with what little that remained of my reputation. When I applied for alternative teaching posts, I found doors were shut in my face. I sought solace in the grape; a panacea not exactly conducive to the furtherance of one’s career. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for a miracle.”

“What happened?”

A rueful smile split Fouchet’s creased face. “I was conscripted.”

The grins began to circulate around the table until Millet, who started to laugh, forgot he was still trying to digest Lasseur’s discarded cod. He was turning red when Charbonneau slapped a palm between his shoulder blades, bringing him back to the vertical and the rest of the table to their senses and reality.

Hawkwood guessed Fouchet’s situation wasn’t unique. The latter’s reference to the hulk’s self-founded academy and the standard of workmanship he’d observed looking over prisoners’ shoulders as he’d traversed the gun deck was proof of that. It was one of the notable differences between the British and French forces. Whereas Britain swelled the ranks with volunteers – which in many cases meant felons and homeless men looking for a roof and a meal – Bonaparte’s troops contained a large portion of conscripted men from all walks of life. In all likelihood, there were probably as many skilled craftsmen and teachers among the mass of prisoners on board Rapacious as there were in any of the small towns lining the shores of the surrounding estuary.

“I see you favour your right leg,” Lasseur said. “You were wounded?”

Fouchet smiled. “Musket ball; just below my knee.” He tapped the joint. “It’s the devil in cold weather; doesn’t work too well in the damp either.”

The teacher turned to Hawkwood. “So, Captain Hooper; what’s your story? How did you come to be captured?”

“There were more of them than there was of me,” Hawkwood said.

Fouchet smiled. “I believe I overheard Murat say it was at Ciudad Rodrigo?”

Hawkwood nodded.

“That’s a long way from home. What was an American doing there?”

The question Hawkwood had been expecting and of which he was most wary.

“Shooting British soldiers; officers mostly.”

“Why?”

“Your Emperor was paying me.”

Fouchet smiled. “I meant why you?”

“I’m a sharpshooter: First Regiment of United States Riflemen. I thought you might need my help.”

“Cheeky bastard,” Charbonneau said. “What makes you think France needs your help?”

Millet rolled his eyes. “Look around, idiot.”

Construct a biography based on your own expertise, James Read had told him. An officer from the Regiment of Riflemen had been the obvious choice. The American equivalent of Hawkwood’s former regiment, the Rifle Corps, used the same methods as its British counterpart, combining the tactics of the Light Infantry and, in the case of the Americans, native Indians, to harass and disrupt enemy movements. The first into the field and the last to leave.

“Heard that was a fearsome fight,” Millet said.

Fouchet frowned. “The siege took two weeks, I think I read.”

“Twelve days,” Hawkwood said. “Might as well have tried to stop the tide. How do you mean, read?”

“It was in the newspapers. They’re forbidden, but we manage to smuggle them in. Costs us a fortune. A few of us understand some English, but it’s usually Murat who translates. Not that we believe everything that’s in them, of course. You were wounded?” The teacher indicated Hawkwood’s facial scars.

“One of their riflemen took a stab at me with his bayonet.”

“You were lucky. You could have lost the eye.”

“He was upset.” Hawkwood shrugged. “We’d killed a lot of his comrades. Our cannon blew them to pieces. It didn’t stop them coming at us, though.”

“What happened to the rifleman?” Charbonneau asked.

“I killed him,” Hawkwood said. “He died, I lived. We surrendered. The British won.”

Hawkwood’s manufactured account wasn’t too far from truth. He’d read the dispatches. The Rifles had been in the thick of the action, providing covering fire for the Forlorn Hope, the forward troops leading the assault on the walls. The breach had been nearly a hundred feet wide, a huge target for the French gunners who’d launched a hail of grapeshot on to the attackers. It was only after the cannons had been destroyed and a French magazine had blown up that the British had managed to finally take the town. That much had been covered in the newspapers, but only the dispatches covered the aftermath, with accounts of how British soldiers, incensed by the slaughter of so many of their comrades, had gone on a drunken rampage. To prevent a massacre, officers had been forced to draw their swords on their own men. To add to his woes, Wellington had lost two of his best generals: Mackinnon of the 3rd Division and the Light Brigade’s Black Bob Crauford, under whom Hawkwood had served on a number of engagements.

“Bastards,” Millet muttered. “Goddamned bastards!”

The occupants of the table fell into a sombre silence.

Charbonneau broke the spell. “What about you?” he asked Lasseur.